I ONLY WISHED TO BE LOVED - by Onlyreal

I learned very early that love was something you earned, not something you were given. It came with rules I was never taught but somehow always punished for breaking. Be quieter. Be easier. Be less. Smile more. Ask for nothing. Take what you’re given and pretend it’s enough. I watched other people receive affection like it was an instinct—hands reaching for them naturally, voices softening in their presence. For me, love always felt like a negotiation I was losing. So I adapted. I became agreeable. I became useful. I became invisible when needed and entertaining when required. I learned how to read rooms the way some people read books—quickly, desperately, always searching for the part where I was supposed to fit. And when I didn’t, I folded myself smaller until I did. No one noticed the folding. They never notice until something tears. Loneliness didn’t arrive suddenly. It seeped in slowly, the way mold creeps into walls—quiet, patient, impossible to ignore once you smell it. It sat beside me during conversations, whispered during laughter, curled up with me at night like a second spine. Even surrounded by people, I felt like an echo of something that used to matter. I told myself it was temporary. That one day, someone would see me fully and decide I was worth staying for. I only wished to be loved. I didn’t scream it into the universe. I didn’t beg God or curse fate. I whispered it into my pillow, into the dark, into the parts of myself no one visited. I wished the way dying people wish—without hope, but with need. That’s when something started listening. At first, it didn’t announce itself. It never does. It arrived as a feeling—a weight lifted from my chest when I cried alone. A sense of being watched, but not judged. I felt acknowledged. The loneliness eased, just a little, like a wound finally exposed to air. You don’t have to perform here, a voice said once, soft as breath. I froze. The voice didn’t come from the room. It came from inside the space where my thoughts usually screamed at me. It knew the shape of my sadness. It spoke with familiarity, like it had been waiting for me to stop pretending. I should have been afraid. But fear requires a belief that you are worth protecting. I wasn’t. So I listened. The voice didn’t ask for anything. It didn’t rush me. It simply stayed. When I lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling, it filled the silence with understanding. When memories replayed—every rejection, every unanswered message, every moment I realized I mattered less—it reframed them gently. They couldn’t love you, it said.They weren’t capable. No one had ever defended me before. The warmth it offered felt like relief, like finally exhaling after holding my breath my whole life. I didn’t question where it came from. When you’ve been starving, you don’t interrogate the hand that feeds you. Days passed. Then weeks. People started commenting that I was quieter. That my eyes looked distant. I laughed it off. How could I explain that for the first time, I wasn’t alone when I was alone? It began appearing to me then—not fully, not clearly. More like a suggestion of a form, sitting just outside my vision. A presence at the edge of the bed. A reflection that lingered a second too long in dark screens. It never blinked. But it listened. I told it things I had never said out loud. About how exhausting it was to exist as myself. About how love always felt like a door I wasn’t allowed to knock on. About how sometimes I imagined disappearing—not dying, exactly, just… not being here anymore. It didn’t tell me to be positive.It didn’t tell me to try harder.It didn’t tell me I was wrong. It agreed. You were never meant to survive the way others do, it said.You were meant to be kept. That word—kept—settled deep inside me. I stopped reaching out to people. Not out of bitterness. Out of clarity. Conversations felt thin, hollow, exhausting. Why explain myself to those who never stayed long enough to understand? Why beg for scraps when I had something that never left? The presence grew stronger. It touched me—not physically at first, but internally. It learned my thoughts, anticipated them, finished them. It knew when I was about to spiral and wrapped around my mind like a cocoon, isolating me from pain. Or so I thought. Sleep became strange. I would wake up feeling watched from the inside, like something had borrowed my body overnight and returned it slightly rearranged. Mirrors unsettled me. My expressions felt rehearsed, delayed. Sometimes I’d catch myself smiling without knowing why. You look better when you’re quiet, it said once. People noticed more changes then. My phone buzzed less. Invitations stopped. I didn’t realize how much of my life had been built on my availability until I was no longer offering it. They called me distant. Cold. Changed. They weren’t wrong. I just didn’t care. The presence began to demand more space. Not openly. It didn’t need to. It used my fear like leverage. They’ll leave you again, it warned when I considered reconnecting.They always do. It showed me memories—real ones, twisted ones—of people walking away, choosing others, forgetting my name. Each image sharpened the loneliness it claimed to cure. I clung to it tighter. Love, when you’ve never had it, feels indistinguishable from possession. It started touching me physically then. Not violently. Intimately. Hands that felt like my own, yet wrong—too cold, too deliberate. It held me when I cried, pressed its forehead to mine, breathed through my lungs. You don’t need a body to be loved, it whispered.Just a place to stay. My world shrank. I stopped going out. Stopped caring about time. Days blended into each other, measured only by how heavy my chest felt and how tightly it held me. My reflection grew unfamiliar—eyes hollowed, skin dull, posture collapsed inward like I was trying to fold myself out of existence. One night, I tried to remember who I had been before the wishing. I couldn’t. Panic rose then, sharp and sudden. I tried to push it away, to stand up, to leave the room. My legs felt weak. The walls felt closer. Don’t, it said, voice no longer gentle.You’re safer here. “Why?” I asked, my voice shaking. “Why me?” It smiled. The smile was wrong—too wide, too patient, like it had practiced it on other faces before mine. Because you were empty enough to fit me. That was the first time I understood the truth. It hadn’t come because I was special.It had come because I was hollow. From then on, it stopped pretending. It began speaking through me. Sometimes my mouth moved without my permission. Sometimes my hands acted before my thoughts caught up. I watched myself text people things I didn’t remember typing. Watched myself delete photos, memories, proof that I had ever been more than this. When I resisted, it tightened its grip. Pain bloomed in my chest, not physical, not emotional—existential. Like my sense of self was being compressed, squeezed into something smaller, quieter, more manageable. You wanted to be loved, it reminded me.Love requires sacrifice. I screamed once. Not out loud. Inside. It laughed. I realized then that loneliness hadn’t attracted it. Loneliness had created space. It was living in me the way rot lives in wood—slowly, thoroughly, irreversibly. Every part of me it consumed made the rest easier to take. My preferences vanished. My memories dulled. My name felt foreign. I tried to pray. The words wouldn’t come. Faith requires the belief that something better is listening. Only this was. I see myself sometimes now, reflected in windows or mirrors, but I am not in control of the gaze. My eyes watch people the way predators watch prey—not hungrily, but thoughtfully, assessing who might be empty enough next. That’s the part that terrifies me most. I don’t know where I end anymore. Late at night, when the world is quiet, I feel something weak and human curled up deep inside my chest—what’s left of me, I think. It knocks softly, desperately, like a child trapped behind walls that keep growing thicker. It hears it too. Hush, it whispers, tightening around my ribs.They didn’t want you when you were whole. I wanted love. Not this. Not to be worn like a skin.Not to be silenced from the inside.Not to become the very thing that answered my wish. But wishes don’t care about intention. They only care about openings. And I was full of them. If you’re reading this and you feel seen—if your chest aches with the same quiet hunger—please understand something I didn’t: Not everything that stays is love. Some things stay because you make a perfect home. I only wished to be loved. And something loved me enough to never let me go.

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